Tom Wicker (1926–2011)

Unto This Hour is a fictional account of the August, 1862, battle known as the Second Bull Run - or Second Manassas - that interweaves the lives of the famous and the ordinary in a drama of death, victory, survival, and finally defeat. Against the vivid backdrop of the actual battle are several subplots that explores the feelings, thoughts, and actions taken by people directly and indirectly affected by the war. Stories of ineptitude, a general's need to prove himself, a reluctant cavalry show more officer that finds love, a girl trying to escape the only life shes known, the life and death decisions and actions of front-line soldiers, a southern lady's struggle to keep control of large plantation full of slaves, one man's desire to capture the terrible destruction of war, and one newspaper man's reckless drive to get the story, even the exploration of forbidden love; the joy of victory, and the agony of defeat.

Did I mention there are a lot of subplots. At first with all the characters and story lines it's hard not to get lost in confusion, but each story line is compelling . The vivid accounts of battle and surgery drives this novel forward and foreshadows the death and destruction that would be brought on the characters in the novels final chapters.

I thought the novel was well researched and Wicker managed to mix fact with fiction effectively. The only real drawback for me was the way Wicker used truncated and misspelled dialogue to show the poor southerns and slaves appear ignorant and uneducated. Even their internal thoughts were written in this “southern' dialect. Since most of the characters are southerns it almost drives you to the point of distraction. Otherwise, Wicker's writing is clear and concise, making the individual stories follow smoothly into one narrative. show less

Some presidents spend their entire careers waiting for their big moment, because, frankly, they never amount to much else. Woodrow Wilson was a good example: A bigoted college professor who managed to back into politics, and won the presidency mostly because the opposition was divided, but still felt that he had the right to be a moral example to the world. For such a man, a biography that is mostly about his presidency is probably in order.

But Eisenhower?

Remember, this is the man who show more organized the Allied invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Normandy in World War II. One can debate how well he did so, but he managed to win the war in Europe. That's why he became President, for pity's sake.

And you'd never know it from this book. It spends only about ten pages on Eisenhower's life before the Presidency, and about one sentence on what came after. It is not a presidential biography; it's a history of a presidency.

Admittedly the books in the American Presidents series operate under strict limits: They have to compress their whole contents into about a hundred and fifty pages. It's often a tight squeeze. Something does have to give. So the volume about James A. Garfield, for instance, gives inordinate space to his slow and agonizing death; that's fair, because it's what people remembered. But even that volume had more about the rest of Garfield's life than this book has about Eisenhower's, and again, Eisenhower was only president because he had been a general, and his career as a general informed his career as a president. You can't understand the one without the other. Yet this book asks you to try -- and, frankly, gets rather bogged down as a result. Too much cold war rivalry with Khrushchev mixed with too many loose ends (for example, the book never even tells us what eventually happened to Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot who was lost over the Soviet Union, resulting in an end to nuclear negotiations).

This is a short, readable book that is a useful reminder of a period few now remember. But I just don't think it's the whole story. show less

This short work offers a reasonably good introduction to the life and times of 1950s- era US Senator Joseph McCarthy, as unscrupulous a demagogue ever to besmirch US politics at the national level. Tom Wicker, a Washington journalist for the New York Times, recounts McCarthy's rapid rise and fall, his methods of achieving power, and the political milieu in which he operated and ultimately failed.

Shooting Star is more useful as a brief biography than as a political analysis. Thus readers show more will have to seek elsewhere for documentation of how lives and careers were destroyed in the name of "anti-communism," and how close the nation came to a domestic form of fascism. Nevertheless, readers may be surprised to see how widely supported McCarthyesque views were throughout the political establishment -- including by US president Dwight Eisenhower and one of McCarthy's own staff members, the young Robert Kennedy. While Wicker's book doesn't add much to what is already known, the history deserves to be recounted, especially now that right- wing revisionists are trying to reclaim McCarthy as a hero. This small book is a sobering reminder of the tenuous nature of political freedom, and how easily unscrupulous politicians can use fear and hatred to fuel their own political ambitions at the expense of the Constitution they pretend to uphold. show less

An early novel by Tom Wicker, long-time columnist for The New York Times. What interested me was to see how much Wicker went on to learn about writing after he published this. It's not bad, but it reminded me of a painting in which everything is detailed and in focus. Just like the eye needs to be guided into an image by effective use of foregrounding, shadow, mistiness, etc., so the mind of a reader. Not everything needs to be described in detail, even if the author is skilled enough to do it.